Unbossing Could Be Your Undoing….Unless
Unbossing became a workplace trend in 2024. Unbossing is the practice of thinning out middle management layers.
Some bodies of thought, such as McKinsey, say that flattening an organisation’s structure minimises micromanagement and allows for closer collaboration between employees and senior leadership.
Others place the practice firmly in the basket of cost-cutting. Whatever the reason, it has impacts if not done correctly. I am a big fan of decentralisation, but it should not just be a matter of laying off managers and allowing those who remain to pick up the workload.
According to Bloomberg, in the US:
“Middle managers - defined as non-executives who oversee employees - make up almost a third of terminations, up from 20% in 2018. In January, United Parcel Service said it would save over $1 billion by slashing 12,000 manager jobs. Citigroup aims to eliminate 20,000 roles over the next several years, shrinking to eight management layers from 13. And more might be coming; mentions of “operational efficiency” in the US hit the highest on record this earnings season, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley.”
Earlier this year, major US corporations such as Meta and Citigroup announced job cuts, of which middle management roles made up 30%.
According to research from Leapsome, over 61% of managers now oversee more direct reports than in 2023. 81% of upper-level managers report an increase in direct reports. Leapsome, together with Opinium, surveyed 2,500 professionals worldwide.
Workloads have increased for 71% of managers since last year. 6 in 10 managers report feeling more overwhelmed than a year ago. Over 50% of managers say their mental well-being has deteriorated over the past year.
Impacts
Unbossing or middle management layoff has left many managers overseeing larger teams and shouldering heavier workloads. The increased strain makes it harder for them to offer the support and guidance their teams need. There will be impacts.
Mental health
Increasing managers' workloads will impact their mental well-being. The fourth State of Workforce Mental Health report from Lyra Health revealed that 27% of managers said their mental health had a significant or severe impact on their ability to do their jobs in 2023, up from 18% in 2022. Lyra talked to 250 HR and benefits leaders with global workforces and over 3,400 employees worldwide.
Australian research conducted by strategic insight agency Opinium on behalf of Perkbox in April 2024 looked at the middle-management structure within companies. It included responses from more than 1000 Australian workplace managers, many of which report to the C-suite. It found that being asked to do more with fewer resources has become an issue for 77% of the managers, with 68% saying that increased role pressure has affected their mental wellbeing and 52% confirming that over the past 12 months, their ability to care for their team has diminished.
UK research by Capterra found that 75% of surveyed middle managers admitted to always or sometimes feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or burned out.
Engagement
When managers are under increasing pressure, they are less engaged, and employee engagement suffers. Gallup found that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.
Decades of Gallup research show that engaged employees produce better business outcomes than other employees across industry, company size, and nationality, and in good economic times and bad. The 2024 findings include:
10% increase in customer loyalty/engagement
23% increase in profitability
18% increase in productivity (sales)
21% decrease in turnover for high-turnover organisations
51% decrease in turnover for low-turnover organisations
78% decrease in absenteeism
Conscious unbossing
A recruitment company Robert Walters survey found that 52% of UK Gen Z professionals did not want to take on a middle-management position. A shift that is being termed “Conscious Unbossing.” Gen Z professionals are intentionally avoiding management positions.
Gen Z prefers flatter structures and moves away from the traditional management role to one where influence is derived from expertise rather than position. But, they also intentionally avoid management positions, perceiving them as extremely demanding for little recompense.
Lucy Bisset, Director of Robert Walters North, said, "It's not that Gen Z doesn't respect leadership. It's that they associate management with stress, limited autonomy, and poor work-life balance."
A significant 69% perceive middle management as a role characterised by high stress levels and minimal rewards.
The situation
So, we have “the Great Unbossing”, removing management layers either to flatten the hierarchy or reduce costs. I believe it is the latter because if you restructure to move away from rigid vertical hierarchies, you do so with more thought and consideration than just laying off 30% of your workforce!
We have “Conscious Unbossing” as Gen Z does not want to fill management positions.
We have remaining managers suffering from adverse impacts on their mental health and rapidly approaching burnout.
How can we remove management layers without incurring the damage we are seeing?
Enablement
We must not let the survivors of the layoffs drown under the increased workload.
According to Robert Walters research, mid-level management roles remain vital, with 89% of employers stating that middle managers play a crucial role in their organisations.
Lucy Bisset hit the nail on the head when she said:
“It’s clear mid-level management remains a lynchpin of any organisation, and to keep these roles filled employers need to innovate their strategies to make them more attractive - from providing more autonomy, to regular workload assessments and clear upskilling opportunities.
Embracing an ‘unbossed culture’ could be key in transforming the role from just being seen as an ‘unnecessary layer’ of management to a ‘facilitator’ who empowers their teams to take their own initiative.
Employers should prioritise middle management now to avoid significant talent gaps in the near future.”
Yes, we should regulate workloads, but we can also help managers with upskilling opportunities. We can help them measure the right things, provide clarity, stop monitoring, empower and trust, prioritise and delegate effectively. All these will save time and effort.
Learn to unlearn
The biggest challenge is that these managers must embrace the concept of learn-unlearn-relearn. They must be prepared to unlearn, eliminating what is not serving them today and learning what will serve them tomorrow.
Learning, unlearning, and relearning is a continuous cycle that requires adaptability and open-mindedness.
The learning phase involves acquiring new knowledge, skills, and strategies.
Unlearn is letting go of old habits, beliefs, and ideas that no longer serve us. This process can be challenging, requiring individuals to confront their biases and preconceptions. Unlearning involves questioning our assumptions, challenging our beliefs, and being open to new perspectives.
Relearn is the process of learning something again, often in a new or different way. Relearning is important because it allows individuals to update their knowledge and skills in response to new information and changing circumstances.
This is the core of my latest book, “Be REMARKABLE! Learn to Unlearn: The New Leadership Mindset.”
Measure the right things
If you measure an employee's hours worked or the number of days they spend in the office, you are wasting your time and destroying trust between you and your employees.
You must measure outcomes and value delivered. Employees want to be measured on the value they deliver, not the volume they deliver.
If you can set an employee a clear goal and agree on the outcomes to be delivered, you can step away and let them get on with the task. This is empowerment and trust.
If you are micromanaging, it is not a good use of your time. Stop it! You employed clever people, so let them do what you employed them for.
Discuss and agree on the following with your employees:
· Outcomes to be achieved
· Timeframes
· Perceived obstacles and blockers
· Factors that will support the achievement of outcomes
· Ways in which the outcomes will be measured
· Frequency of check-ins and progress reporting
When you step away, you are not abdicating accountability for your employees’ work. Your employees must know that you are always there to provide support and guidance when they need it. You have agreed on how often you will check in and the cadence of progress reporting. Everything else should be driven by what your employees need from you.
Empowerment and trust
Managers who empower their employees give them the autonomy to make their own decisions and own their work. Once again, this saves time and effort and increases employee engagement, creativity, innovation, and motivation.
Refrain from micromanaging and eating up your valuable time. Trust your employee to deliver on the outcomes you have agreed to without watching over their shoulder every step of the way. Expect your employee to undertake a task differently than you would. The approach does not matter if the outcomes are achieved.
Empower your employees to make decisions without having to get your agreement every time. Managers often fear that an employee will make a horrendous decision that will cost the organisation a lot of time and money to rectify.
Two things come into play regarding decision-making and risk. Firstly, start with something with minimal risk when delegating your first task and empowering employees. Not only will you feel more comfortable knowing that not much could go wrong, but so will your employees. The second thing is the provision of guardrails. These are parameters employees can operate within without seeking additional guidance or advice. Guardrails, like the protective barriers on the road, prevent or deter anyone from crossing into dangerous areas.
Prioritisation
We often try to do everything on our to-do list, when what we really need to do is decide what we need to do by urgency and importance and whether we should delegate a task. A tool called the Eisenhower Matrix, also called the urgent-important matrix, helps achieve this.
The name comes from its inventor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the thirty-fourth president of the United States, serving two terms from 1953 to 1961. Before becoming president, he served as a US Army general and Allied forces Supreme Commander during World War II. He was highly productive, and researchers have widely studied his methods. The Eisenhower Matrix is one of his most famous productivity tools.
Using the decision matrix shown here, you can categorise your actions based on four possibilities:
1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
2. Important but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
3. Urgent but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks you will eliminate).
Eisenhower's principle differentiated urgent and important: “What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”
Urgent tasks are those you feel you must act on, such as making a phone call, sending a text, attending a meeting, responding to emails, etc. They’re time-sensitive in that you are working to a deadline. Examples include responding to a customer request or completing a project with an imminent due date.
Important tasks support strategic progress toward your personal and professional long-term goals. These tasks may not be urgent, but that doesn’t mean they are insignificant. An example could be commencing a recruitment campaign for an executive assistant to cover a period of maternity leave.
When you can differentiate between urgent and important tasks, you can allocate them into the four quadrants of the Eisenhower Matrix:
· Do (important and urgent): These tasks are both important and urgent. They must be done as soon as possible, as they have clear consequences and impact your long-term goals. These tasks need to be done today or tomorrow at the latest, and they will be at the top of my mind. An example could be a critical software fix for your accounting platform.
· Decide (important and not urgent): These are important but not urgent tasks. They impact your long-term goals, but you do not need to do them immediately. You can schedule them. You will address these tasks once you have completed the tasks in the “Do” quadrant.
· Delegate (not important and urgent): These tasks are not important, but they are urgent. They have an immediacy but do not impact your long-term goals. You don’t need a unique skill set for these tasks, meaning you can delegate them to people with the bandwidth to handle them quickly, allowing you to focus on other things. You may also be able to automate some of these tasks. An example could be using a news aggregator rather than trawling through online sources.
· Delete (not important and not urgent): These tasks are not important, nor are they urgent. They do not help you meet your long-term goals. When you have allocated tasks into the other three quadrants, what is left over will likely be placed here. These tasks simply get in the way of you getting things done. Examples could be checking social media or sorting through junk mail. Often, these tasks are the ones you need to learn to say “no” to so you don’t get inundated with tasks that do not add any value.
Delegation
Tasks that fall into the “urgent and not important” quadrant – Delegate – are nearly always the interruptions from your intended direction. The problem is that most people spend their time in this quadrant, thinking they are working on urgent tasks that are important to them when, in reality, these tasks are doing nothing to move you toward your long-term goals.
Often, tasks get stuck here because people are not comfortable with delegation.
You can effectively delegate when you follow these steps.
· Focus on clarity – be clear about the task you intend to delegate
· Assign the task - the person to whom you are delegating the task must know why you are doing it
· Convey your requirements – be clear about the task, desired outcomes, timeframes and available resources
· Set clear expectations - there is no room for ambiguity
· Offer support - your delegate must know you are there to support them whenever needed
Summary
Do not unboss without enabling those remaining. Help them measure the right things, provide clarity, stop monitoring, empower and trust, prioritise and delegate effectively.